I have drawn and painted all my life. My mother was a painter. In my teens I had the great good fortune to be mentored, like the young Francis Bacon, by the Anglo-Australian painter Roy de Maistre. I studied at the Central School of Art, especially under the painter Noel Forster, and I am a Philosophy graduate. When young I worked as a junior curator for ten years at the British Museum (Departments of Prints & Drawings and Oriental Antiquities), where I could handle and study masterworks of western and eastern art.

 

My output is both secular and religious - though in my own art there is no real distinction between the two. Everything I do now, whether church commissions or otherwise, stems from what you may call a catholic consciousness. The paintings often reflect interest in the relationship between the human and non-human orders (I am a Fellow of the Zoological Society of London) - and I should add that the papal encyclical Laudato si' has been very fruitful for me, particularly with regard to its teaching on the eternal vocation of animals.



Although for artistic purposes I take a sustained interest in empirical appearances, my real focus is on the inner world. I want my pictures to reach those aspects of our experience which are not really amenable to language. From one perspective they are naturalistic, but from another they are not; they are visual metaphors reflecting some drama or situation at a spiritual level. Fuseli's quip: 'hang nature, she puts me out' comes to mind.

 

It has taken me many years to reconcile in painting two aspects of my nature: one a very vivid imagination; the other highly analytical, critical. Gradually I've evolved a way of painting in which these aspects are reconciled and complement each other - rather than glare at each other from opposite sides of an abyss! The paintings are generally large, in oil on canvas or panel.

 

Naturally I am keenly interested in contemporary and recent art, with great respect for Max Ernst, Picasso of the inter-war years, pittura metafisica, Francis Bacon of the 1940s & 50s and much else. But these interests are not confined to the present or immediate past, but also range over the English 18th & early 19th centuries (Stubbs, Fuseli, Reynolds, Romney, et al), French Ancien Regime painting plus Ingres and Seurat, the American luminists, Spanish 17th century painting, late mediaeval North European painting, and Russian icons following Patriarch Nikon's 17th century reforms. I continue to admire Chinese landscape art of the late Tang, Sung and Yuan dynasties, and have an abiding interest in Tibetan and mediaeval Japanese religious art.  

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